


of the gentle eyes

by philthestone



Category: Outlander (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Fluff, VERY loosely. grad students are not nearly the prototypical college au, but mild reference to bjr being creepy, i wanted my 150th ao3 story to be star wars but this happened instead, ive barely written any early relationship jamieclaire so this was itching to come out, not really angst.
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-09
Updated: 2020-12-09
Packaged: 2021-03-10 09:02:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,034
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27968015
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/philthestone/pseuds/philthestone
Summary: “How’s the thesis coming?”He makes a noise at the back of his throat and scratches one cheek, leaning down to tug the ancient laptop back into his lap. She catches a hint of his aftershave but none of her own floral hair products, which means he didn’t shower at her apartment. Something about the break in pattern makes the lump in her throat grow tighter. “No’ bad. Bulldozed my way through a couple’ve paragraphs.”“To the tried and true tunes of the Jamie Fraser Capercaillie angst playlist?” she asks solemnly, croaking a bit around that lump.She thinks Jamie must notice, because he meets her gaze."Better'n Taylor Swift," he says. Claire pouts.
Relationships: Claire Beauchamp/Jamie Fraser
Comments: 37
Kudos: 110





	of the gentle eyes

**Author's Note:**

> i should be working on my own thesis and i am instead writing about other people working on their theses. funny how life works
> 
> small content warning for an oblique discussion of a professor behaving inappropriately toward a student in the past. but if it isnt clear in the fic itself, it is strictly limited to creepiness only, which remains a completely justifiable reason to avoid the hell out of somebody.
> 
> anyway, any form of review makes me so happy, and i hope you enjoy

Claire is muttering profanity within a half-second of opening the door to her flat, which captures the day's mood rather succinctly. 

The screen jammed. Of course it jammed. It always jams, and she has to give it a nice shove with her shoulder, and nine times out of ten the movement slams her toe against the threshold ledge. The miserable thing should've been fixed ages ago, but Claire’s found herself at that point in her life where she's miraculously landed a surprisingly handy boyfriend but it is as yet too early in the relationship that she could unsolicitedly ask him to fix the bloody door. 

Bugger.

Claire thinks this as the offending door swings cheerfully shut behind her. She stands in the cramped front hallway for a moment, staring at the worn welcome mat and her lopsided umbrella stand. 

Shaking herself, she breathes deeply. She's always incapable of achieving it properly on the cramped metro back home. The knot she wrangled her hair into that morning has flattened, loosened, and is heralding the beginnings of a scalp-related headache. Her nose is still running from the sharp grey-cold wind that chased her all the way home from the Royal Infirmary. The soles of her feet hurt from a twelve-hour residency shift. The last of her too-giant to-go coffee is ebbing out of her system. 

And, now that she’s exhaled, her front hallway’s muted eggshell colours feel oddly foreboding; the acrid taste of the morning’s quarrel is leaking into the pockets of her cheeks.

It tides back out again, just a little bit, when she leans down to unlace her boots. The light in the kitchen is on, soft and yellow around the corner, and Jamie’s worn runners, smelling just damp enough that he must have come back to the flat straight from the gym, are lined up neatly against the wall, beside the umbrella stand. 

Claire unbuttons her coat and shrugs her bag off of one shoulder, then steps out of her boots and drops her keys softly into the little bowl on the hall table. She passes through the corner of the kitchen, leaning over to scratch behind Adso’s sleeping ear -- he’s curled up behind the toaster, and she does not stop to dwell on the cat’s sanity too long -- puts the kettle on, and then slips into the living room, still in her scrubs.

Jamie’s on her couch, stretched out in that awkward way people sit when the thing they are sitting upon is too small to be holding them. 

He’s asleep. Softened and rumpled, but like he didn’t mean for it to happen. One cheek presses against the couch cushions, bending his glasses at an uncomfortable angle. His chin pokes downward, like he’s slid a few inches since he first dozed off. The hem of his t-shirt has ridden up his stomach. Over his legs sits his ancient, clunky laptop, whirring like its life depends on it. She feels oddly like he’d camped out, waiting for her to arrive home. 

Claire, hovering, swallows against a funny numb feeling in her throat. 

_Quarrel_ is perhaps the wrong word to describe that morning. _Brawl_ , she thinks, comes more easily to mind. _Riot_. _Chaotic collision of daft proportions_.

God, she can barely even remember what they fought about. One minute she was wrestling with her tube of mascara in the bathroom and the next minute she was loudly accusing her boyfriend of micromanagement. Every word felt like it swelled into something larger than itself. Claire had hovered in the middle of the laminate-floored kitchen like a headless specter attempting an amateur version of emotional amputation of _nothing_ , with a proverbial old-timey band saw, and screamed. 

Was it toaster-related, perhaps? 

_No one is forcing you to put up with me_ , she’d said. And Jamie had yelled, _feck_ off _, Claire,_ in a way he hadn’t really ever done before, like he was really actually angry.

She presses the heel of one hand into her eye. Jamie rarely ever swears. Even less often at her. She remembers the unexpected thrill of teasing him into it, a few weeks into their relationship, trying very hard not to giggle as his ears flushed so pink she could physically feel the heat radiating from them.

This was -- decidedly different.

She is worried that the laptop might crash to the floor, so she pads over, sock-footed, intent on righting it. She kneels down beside the couch. There’s a cup of coffee on the coffee table, completely cold, two stacked textbooks, and a scattered mess of post-its that mean he must have been trying to get work done on his thesis. An uneaten plate of celery, carrots and dip covers a haphazard sheet of notes. From the laptop’s old speakers, Claire can hear the crooning tunes of a woman’s voice and their smooth, folksy backdrop, muted in the quietude of the living room. She’s closer to him now. He’s got that odd, stern expression his features sometimes settle into when he drifts off with a lot on his mind.

Very gently, she lifts laptop, setting it down on the coffee table in front of her. Clearly Jamie hasn’t been asleep long enough for his screensaver to start running; she can see the four open documents, as well as the minimized Spotify window in the corner.

_“... difference between a, in to, as in a bhàn, a bhos, a nis, a stigh, a steach, and a, as in a rìs, used before verbs. Origins of the distinction date back to as early as the first decade of the 1500s, because of a shift in ownership of linguistic tools --”_

_Dec 8 dont forget to give Jen key to flat for rug; rupert birthday sat; pick up cat food for claire (+ surprise candles she likes?? ask mary where she gets them)_

**_Event Reminder:_ ** _Friday, November 12th, 7:00 p.m. Humanities Mixer, all departments welcome_

The little calendar update wooshes itself away as cheerfully as it popped up. 

Claire feels her stomach sink.

She does not think _bugger_ again, much as that is her immediate impulse. Instead, she presses two fingers into the bridge of her nose, still kneeling over her own ratty carpet floor, and tries to ignore the sticky feeling of her dirty scrubs under her armpits. And the fact that she has an exam in a week. And the lingering exhaustion of the day, settling happily at the base of her bun, which is by now surely akin to a cartoon witch’s updo she and Geillis once saw crossing campus in October. 

The sour taste of the morning does not disappear fully -- though she does feel her chest open in a huff of relief -- but suddenly Jamie’s tightly-wound, irritable mood makes a lot more sense.

“Claire?”

Claire starts. Apparently, even half a meter away, her giant-sized, sleep clumsy boyfriend manages to move with the silent grace of the Amazonian wildcat. Claire herself has never mastered this art.

His voice is gravelly and somehow both higher and lower than usual. 

“Hi,” Claire says, a bit stupidly.

Jamie pushes himself into more of a sitting position against one elbow. A large hand comes up to rub at his eyes, under his lopsided glasses, in a somewhat childlike movement. There are couch upholstery creases on his cheek. Claire does not comment on this; abruptly, the day’s exhaustion has passed lingering tension and now exists as a lump in the base of her throat.

“How late’s et?” Jamie mutters, squinting a bit. 

“Not that late,” Claire says. There’s still daylight outside and everything. “I thought the old IBM was going to crashland, so I moved him.” 

He makes a belated huffing noise at her habitual joke -- _it’s sturdy, Sassenach, no’_ clunky -- then moves as though to sit up fully and peer owlishly at his phone. 

“I didn’t want to wake you,” Claire continues, unsure quite what she means by it, but sure she doesn’t want silence. Jamie is in the middle of shaking his ruddy head in some sort of effort to dispel his post-nap muzziness. He swipes one hand at his jaw, running the other over his t-shirt to tug it back down, before he offers Claire a small smile.

“‘S alright.” He sounds markedly more articulate already, but still -- awkward. Carefully controlled. “I was just waitin’ for ye t’get home.”

She nods, still seated on the floor.

“How’s the thesis coming?”

He makes a noise at the back of his throat and scratches one cheek, leaning down to tug the ancient laptop back into his lap. She catches a hint of his aftershave but none of her own floral hair products, which means he didn’t shower at her apartment. Something about the break in pattern makes the lump grow tighter. “No’ bad. Bulldozed my way through a couple’ve paragraphs.”

“To the tried and true tunes of the Jamie Fraser Capercaillie angst playlist?” she asks solemnly, croaking a bit around that lump.

She thinks Jamie must notice, because he meets her gaze. She watches as he purses his lips in a careful twitch. 

Right. 

She did not mean to antagonize. 

But then, he shifts, his brow softening, and he doesn’t seem to be too upset -- only caught in an awkward angle between affectionate, sheepish, and exasperated.

“Aye, weel,” is all he says. “Better’n Taylor Swift.”

“I have taste, thank you.”

“At least ye canna call me predictable, Sassenach.”

“Yes,” she says, “because there is absolutely _nothing_ melancholy about your melancholy music selection --”

Jamie groans, and slumps back against the couch, laptop still in hand, the conversation back to zero. Claire plucks at one of the post-its on the table, covered in his shockingly decent handwriting. She can see the edge of her own stack of flashcards, prepped for her upcoming exam, tucked away in the corner of the living room atop a bookshelf that houses nothing but third year medical textbooks, an old journal of Uncle Lamb’s, and a half-dead houseplant. Jamie’s schoolbag lays slumped open beneath it. Beside that, an oddly shaped antique-y lamp that Geillis found at a rather eclectic country auction last year, during one of she and Claire’s last-roommate-hurrah adventures, and promptly bequeathed away.

There is a small pause. 

“Why didn’t you tell me about the mixer?” she asks, quietly.

If Jamie is surprised at this turn in conversation -- or perhaps expecting a more traditional, _I’m sorry I exploded at you over toast like the manifestation of the modern-day banshee earlier --_ he doesn’t show it. Instead, he’s picking at a thread on the leg of his sweatpants. Already this is uncharacteristic -- in the few months she has known James Fraser, she has realized that _avoidant_ is not within his repertoire of personality quirks. But he looks up eventually, and says,

“I didnae want tae -- I dinna ken. Worry ye with it, or anythin’.”

“Can’t you just not go?”

He grimaces. It would be comical if Claire was not feeling the tight coil of protectiveness deep in her belly. “Unfortunately no’. They asked Alec tae say a few words on our project an’ he wants me tae do it for us. To -- I dunno. Networking, ye ken.”

“Right,” Claire says. 

Claire herself hates networking; she can never muster up quite the right amount of plastered smile to get through an evening of talking to all manner of boobie-headed male doctors who consider themselves beyond the natural attainment of mortal man, in a professional culture that is generally beyond cutthroat for all the stupidest reasons. She thinks she’s only made it so far through sheer belligerence. And Joe says she has natural talent, which she’s sure counts for something.

Jamie, on the other hand, can make genuinely pleasant conversation with a brick wall, and usually approaches wheedling ancient professors into injecting real passion through their research talk like one would a personal challenge. 

“Right,” says Claire a second time. “So I’ll come with you, and it’ll be perfectly fine.”

His grimace deepens, the hand already on his leg twitching into a fist.

“Sassenach --”

“Listen,” Claire says, stealing an uneaten bit of celery from his forgotten plate and crunching practically into it. “Tag-teaming to avoid one’s creepy undergraduate history professor who had a penchant for sexual-interest-related favouritism is at _least_ sixty percent of the basis of this relationship. I have complete faith in us.”

Jamie slumps a little bit in his seat. His cheek is still covered in couch upholstery, in splotchy little pink marks.

“I canna understand how ye eat those things without the dip,” he says.

“Vegetables are good for preventing scurvy,” Claire replies, without missing a beat. Her mouth is full of celery.

“And we’re livin’ in the yee olden times, apparently.”

“It’s yummy!”

“Celery’s jest _water_. Ye never drink those smoothies I give ye.”

“Kale is the Devil’s food,” Claire insists. The old laptop’s speakers continue to filter Joan MacLachlan’s soft voice into her tiny beige living room. She says, “So?”

Jamie sighs, tension creeping back into his expression, along with a smaller, less obvious ripple of -- something.

Claire is not the world’s most perceptive people-reader, but even she can catch the resigned thread of insecurity. 

“Ye’ve got a shift that night,” he says, as though the non-starter should be obvious. “ _And_ yer exam next week.”

She stills, celery held suspended in midair. He’s right; she does have a shift that night, and it’ll be a complete pain in the arse to reschedule it. Her floor supervisor will give her hell. She looks at him carefully. She thinks again that her couch is not large enough to house him. He’s wearing the same shirt he was this morning -- plastered with the peeling backflip of some superhero or other -- when he slammed the oatmilk bottle down on the counter slightly too hard. Sometimes she gets so annoyed with him that all she wants to do is shove his shoulder, as hard as she possibly can, for the unique pleasure of _doing_ it. He’d suggested they go visit his sister’s family for Christmas last week and she’s been thinking about it constantly, like this big unknown poking at the backs of her knees when she’s trying to focus on her electrophysiology homework. It’s only been a few _months_ , she thinks. 

She is self-aware enough, just suddenly, to acknowledge that her toaster warpath was not really related much to any toasters. 

“I’ll reschedule it,” Claire says simply.

Jamie blinks at her.

“What?”

“I will _reschedule_ my shift on the surgical residents’ floor,” Claire repeats with confidence, “and I will come with you to your mixer, and I will wear my Julia Roberts from Pretty Woman red dress --”

“At a _graduate mixer_ ,” Jamie manages --

“-- and be such a spectacularly charming conversationalist --”

“ _Lord,_ Claire --” 

(She can see him starting to laugh --)

“ -- that all of your stodgy professors will flock around us such that we are constantly surrounded by normal, mostly-non-creepy people, and you’ll dazzle them all with your brilliant research and then we’ll Uber home and you shall extract me from said Julia Roberts from Pretty Woman dress, and --”

Claire emits a somewhat ungainly squeak as she is abruptly hauled up from her position on the floor and into Jamie’s lap. She lands on his chest -- he moved the bloody laptop, she thinks, however did he manage that? -- one hand landing awkwardly against his stomach and her loosening hair getting stuck in her nose. He pulls her closer to him, and she expects he’s going to kiss her. 

Instead, she finds herself quite suddenly wrapped in a tight, full-bodied bear hug. 

It’s warm in all the right places. Partially, because they are both a tad sweaty -- Jamie from his nap and Claire from her day of residency slough -- but Jamie presses his face into the crook of her neck, and brings his hands far around enough that they splay over her opposing ribs, and brackets her legs with his knees. She’s so close to him that she can feel his heartbeat against hers. It’s really strong. The doctor in her, zeroing in on bloody intricacies and layered tissue, is quietly impressed. The rest of her is re-experiencing that earlier lump in her throat. She winds her arms more properly around him, fingers tangling into the short curls at the nape of his neck. She lets them breathe together like that, for a few moments. Like they’re vibrating, very slowly, with the ebb and flow of everything in the world. 

It’s quiet enough that she can hear Adso, newly awake, _mrow_ ing from the kitchen. 

She says, “I’m sorry I blew up at you this morning,” into the graphic on his t-shirt.

“I’m sorry I blew up at ye too,” Jamie says. He pulls her upright to face him, hands tight over her arms. God -- he looks so serious. “I shouldnae’ve -- I should never have spoken to ye like that, Claire.”

“It’s alright,” Claire says. “I mean it, Jamie, I --” 

She does not know, exactly, how to say it. 

_You have to tell me when you’re afraid of things_ does not sound appropriate. _I have to tell you when I’m afraid of things_ feels equally over-simple. 

“I need to take a shower,” is what she lands on. But she thinks the rest of it will be exchanged at one point. At any rate. Jamie’s eyes are already glowing somewhat impishly. 

“Aye,” he says, “verra much so --”

“ _Oooh_ \--”

“But ye ken I like ye a bit smelly.”

“Don’t be _gross_ \--”

“I’m jest sayin’, _a nighean_ \-- ow, don’t pinch me! Och, d’ye want me tae help ye study later?”

“God, I want to order Indian food and not leave this flat for nine years. Did you know I saw a man’s brain today?”

“Ye mean in an x-ray?”

“No, Jamie, I _saw_ a man’s _brain_. It was utterly brilliant.”

“Utterly brilliant, she says.”

“So back to my nine-year-in-flat proposition --”

“Truly? _Nine_ years?”

“Apologies. Nine years in flat with brief excursion for your defense -- and _then_ \--”

The cat’s mewling accelerates in volume, and Claire remembers that she’s entirely forgotten the tea she put on. She stays on the couch with him for another five minutes. Before she leaves for her shower, she takes one of Jamie’s hands in hers, and squeezes.

**Author's Note:**

> the former part of the sentence that was supposed to be a line in jamies thesis is pulled from wikipedia (under "etymology of scottish gaelic") but the latter half of it is completely and totally fiction. i know jamie has like a million potentially marketable skills but i always gravitate toward making him endure a phd in linguistics bc 1) i think his intelligence and relative level of education are highly underappreciated 2) i come from a family of academics and i like to project and 3) the level of post-modernism permeating the humanities in contemporary times would drive jamie absolutely bonkers and i think that's just inherently hilarious
> 
> the fic title is translated from one of capercaillie's songs (which are very lovely), and contrary to what claire says, they do have plenty of melancholy pieces, but i really like their softer, prettier 90s stuff and i thought it would be funny if modern au jamie had a habit of angst listening to upbeat folksy female vocals. as u can see most of this fic was just "i thought it would be funny if" at jamie frasers expense. bless him
> 
> finally, i dont know anything abt medical school or graduate school in the uk so deepest apologies for any glaring inaccuracies
> 
> im trying to learn how to just write things for the fun of it and not overthink the value of each of my pieces. hopefully, i will be able to achieve that with this one. stay safe guys <3


End file.
